The American Dream

Gerald L. Zelizer

Programs sold at sporting events describe players by height, weight, age college attended, and years in the league. More extensive biographies would reveal much about how the American immigrant experience has been conveyed through a family history into the life of a particular player. How much of the original model remains and how much has been made over in America?

Mitch Marrow is described by Pro Football Weekly as a "weekend warrior who looks as if he were weaned on a Cybex weight machine." He is 6-4, 287 pounds, runs the 40 yard dash in 4.65, bench presses 500 pounds, and both broad and vertical jumps at astonishing levels. The Carolina Panthers of the National Football League drafted him in the third round out of the University of Pennsylvania to play defensive line.

Mitch is a double anomaly in a sport where stacks of strength that move at reckless speed are routine. He is an Ivy League Player selected high in the NFL draft. He is Jewish.

First generation Jewish immigrants became boxers as a first step in pursuit of the American dream. The savagery of fighting was fair cost for distancing oneself from more servile Eastern European ancestors. In the 1920's and 30's names like Leonard, Ross, and Levinsky were as familiar on boxing marquis as are Lopez, Briggs, and Holyfield today. Second generation Jews entered more genteel sports, like baseball. When Hank Greenberg decided not to play in critical game in the 1933 pennant race because it fell on the holiest Jewish Day of Atonement, many Jews who still did not yet feel completely accepted in America, worried.

Gentile poet Edgar Guest, though, celebrated: "Said Murphy to Mulrooney, 'We shall lose the game today! We shall miss him in the infield and shall miss at the bat. But he's true to his religion and I honor him for that!"

More recently, it has been rare, but not unprecedented, for Jews to play pro football. Ed Newman, guard for the Miami Dolphins in the 1980's, and Harris Barton for the San Francisco Forty-Niners in the 1990's both achieved all pro status as offensive linemen.

Mitch Marrow brings the tale of Jewish ascendancy into America through sports full circle. Like the Jewish boxers of the first generation, this man of the fourth competes in a game that hinges on combined strength and speed. What differentiates him from the earlier gladiators , is the underlying reason why he chooses an occupation so dissimilar to his high school friends from Harrison, New York, who are today computer, accounting, and legal neophytes. Mitch's pugilist predecessors climbed into the ring as a first step up the ladder of the American dream. The Marrow family have already ascended that ladder. His grandfather was an infantry soldier in WW II. He landed at the Normandy invasion, where the bulk of his unit was killed, marched with Patton's Eighth Army, and eventually witnessed the skeletons, dead and alive, of his Jewish compatriots in the death camps near Munich. Mitch's parents are entrepreneurs, who sent their son to private high school in Connecticut and to the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania.

Mitch's attitudes and actions reflect remnants of earlier immigrant pride combined with the homogenization bestowed by American arrival. In self- confidence, he wears a Jewish star around his neck while playing. He unabashedly recounts of his mother's weekly studying of Judaism with a charismatic teacher. Understanding that much of the post game prayer by teammates is Christian, he observes; "I just kneel down too and pray in my own way." Demonstrative pride in one's religion, and worshipping ecumenically with others in one's own flavor are American values which actually fortify Mitch's ethnic/religious origins.

America has been good to him and his family and they have paid their entrance fee. Well qualified, why wouldn't he pursue a career in football at the most competitive level? "I feel privileged to do something I really like and do well financially at the same time." Aspiring to happiness, wealth, success, and status are bedrock American values.

By the time Sandy Koufax also declined to pitch in the 1965 World Series which occurred on the Day of Atonement a more secure Jewish community expressed pride. Marrow, when asked what would be his choice if faced with a similar conflict, responded: "I'll cross that bridge when I come to it." American pragmatism prevailing over religious strictures is also part of the immigrant story.

The Jewish path from boxing to baseball to football may be a blueprint for all contemporary first generation ethnic groups. Who knows? Perhaps, as Mitch Marrow talks of his pro football days with his own grandchildren, they will be admiring players with names like Singh, Duckchun and Hee who had the good fortune to mature in Harrison, New York, attend exclusive schools, and build their bodies at the Cybex machine. The sport they play and the logo Made In America will dominate, but will not totally obliterate all remnants of their forefathers. In some ways, assimilation into America actually revives some of the original ethnic feelings.